Density of Doc's Destiny
by BritishAlien
Summary: The letter. The torn letter. It presents so many questions and worries. What to do with it? Here, Doc Brown ruminates on the density of his destiny.


Wednesday November 16th 1955 8:09pm

The door swung coolly on its hinges and rested comfortably as it came to close. Shoes were discarded and laid across the fireplace, whilst a hat was thrown haphazardly onto the back of one of the sofas. He didn't know where it landed. Doctor Emmett Brown was home. And for the first time in just under two weeks, there was not a sound to be heard.

The last two weeks had been one hell of a turning point in the scientist's life. A young man wearing a life preserver had turned up on his doorstep, proclaiming to be from the future. Emmett hadn't thought much of the boy. He'd assumed it was a dare. Ever since the Philpotts from next door had moved away, there had been very few family friends in the neighbourhood. All replaced by families with names he couldn't and didn't want to remember with annoying kids who enjoyed smoking and leaning against privet hedges. He'd assumed that the young man in the life preserver was on some kind of dare. An intangible form of play which delights the stimuli in a person's mind to take a risk. Something that Emmett knew all about, but not at the expense of others. Or at least, so he had thought, until Marty had entered into his life.

And Marty had turned out to mean so much to the aging scientist. Marty was part of his future, and no matter which way he looked at it, the future was coming to get him.

Until the accident with the clock and the toilet bowl, Doc had considered time as an extravagant fascination. Something to be teased but never touched. But all had changed with that lucky mistake and the arrival of Marty. His life had been turned upside down and now Doc had something to strive for. He knew that he would achieve something worthwhile with his life. Something that he'd be remembered for in the years after his death. He'd finally invented something that worked…To see the time machine work had filled Emmett with an unmeasured sense of euphoria. A consolation that he would one day be able to talk about the events of the last week. He'd never expected to see Marty, a different Marty from further along in his own time stream, return from the future, with the him, Doc Brown, from a later point in his time stream. What he had learnt from then on had constituted a myriad of possibilities. He'd discovered him tombstone, which if logic permitted, had been there since before he was born. And now Marty was back in time, in 1885, to save him. Had been back in time to save him. Doc was never any good with tenses.

He'd just returned from the Drive-in theatre. He had stayed for a while afterwards and watched as the flaming fire tracks petered out and vanished. Leaving no trace of the amazing temporal experiment that had taken place. It had all been quite remarkable.

It was quite late now. The night was closing in like a predator stalking its prey. In the past few weeks, Doc had had very little time to stop and think and now that he could, a whole consortium of ideas and questions were rushing into his mind. All of which fascinated him and opened up an insane theory, which Doc had never even dreamed of. Fulfilment. He was a scientist, all of his work was worth something…to him that is….but now through this unprecedented happiness of fulfilment, Doc was content.

But there was one thing that troubled him. He dare not look at it. After Marty had returned from the future and taken him home, Doc had been too busy to think about it, but when he had taken the coat off, he had left it somewhere that he would see it. And be reminded of the humongous weight that now lay on his shoulders.

The letter. That damned letter. It had been about the future. Something important, something telling. But Doc had ripped it up. He couldn't know too much about the future or there was no destiny to it all. Emmett Brown already knew too much about his future. Far too much to still call it destiny. Too much to think that he had a free choice. Well, he did have a free choice. All that had happened over the past few weeks had been as a result of his free will, but now that they had happened, would they be done by choice or obligation?

Doc couldn't go into that all now. He had….work to be done. He had to clean up the place. Make sure that he got rid of all that had happened in the past weeks. He'd hide them, so that when the time came he could show them to Marty. When Marty also remembered the events of 1955. But Doc would have to wait a long time for that to happen. Thirty years in fact. THIRTY YEARS!

Time and tide waits for no man, unless you're Doctor Emmett Brown! Time drags on. Those years would be filled with actually building the time machine and….other things that people do when they live, but the memories of that week would be there fuelling him on to achieve his life's greatest work.

But the letter was still a burden. Should Doc piece it back together and read it? Should he play with fate and not open it and see what time brings? Choices…eh? What about causality and effect? He had to question the density of his destiny and sum up what one would do to the other. The implications could be disastrous if he read that letter…

And then Doc figured 'What the hell'

-x-x-x-

Thanks for reading.

This is a mini break from my main Back to the Future writing at the moment. If you want to check out that series, please feel free to do so and tell me what you think. There will hopefully be plenty more where this and that came from.

Hope you enjoyed. Thank you x


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